The Mere Gook Rule

http://www.vice.com/read/vietnam-and-the-mere-gook-rule

he quieted down and said he wanted to tell me a story about a member of his unit. And he talked about how they were going through a village and burning it down, which was standard operating procedure. And in the midst of this, this woman runs up and grabs this GI by the sleeve, and is tugging at him and yelling at him—obviously because her home is being burned down, all her possessions are going up in flames. And she's angry, scared, upset. And he said this GI just pushed her off, and then took his rifle and hit her squarely in the nose with the butt. And he said her face just erupted in blood. She was screaming. And the GI just turned around and walked away laughing. And he paused a second and said, "Do you know that GI was me?" He had such a tough time figuring out how he could have done it. All these years later. At the time he didn't think anything of it, and in the years since, he couldn't help but think of it on a constant basis. And it really haunted him. And I had the same problem trying to match up the man that I was talking to with his 19-year old self.
He told me about how the training that he went through dehumanized the Vietnamese to the point where they didn't think of them as human. They thought of them as—they had a whole bunch of slurs that were used: dinks, slopes, slants, gooks. And he talked about how "I didn't become exactly like a robot but it was like that." You're trained to kill, you chant "Kill, kill kill." It psychologically readies you for this.

You write about the US troops widespread dismembering of Vietnamese corpses. Why did this become such a common practice?
There are a lot of factors at play. Body count, and the way to prove the body count was to bring in an ear. This was a practice in some units. There were incentives tied to body count, winning R&R at a beach resort in country or extra beer, medals, badges.
In other cases, troops had this belief that Vietnamese spirituality said that if the corpse wasn't intact, they wouldn't be able to move into the afterlife. A lot of Americans would call it "Buddha heaven." So they had this belief that dismembering Vietnamese would be a form of psychological warfare. They would leave a "death card," either an ace of spades playing card or a specially made up, like a business card, with the unit's name on it and generally some sort of grim motto attached.
There was also an active trade in body parts in Vietnam. Ears were worn on necklaces, one ear or maybe even a whole chain of ears. Some guys wore these to show their combat prowess. Others would collect these ears and sell them to people who wanted to project this image. In one unit they were cutting off the heads of enemies, and anyone who presented it to the commander got an extra beer ration. In one case, a sergeant had cut off a head and he boiled the flesh of it, and then traded the skull for a radio.

ZVUGKTUBM wrote:Good article. In today's world, the "Muslims," "ragheads," and "Islamists" are the new "gooks."

PaceDog and Ghandi would like to eradicate the world's Muslims. They are a threat to humanity. Sort of the same way Hitler thought the Jews needed to be eradicated.

I would also like to eradicate idiotic liberals who mention other peoples names on posts like this.

Did the gooks have a mere American rule?